The Thunderbolt Pony. Stacy Gregg

and then I am done. My heartbeat slows further. I can breathe now. The air goes in and out and there’s a lightness in my chest. I am ready.

      When I emerge from the tent this time, I have my backpack on and I feel better because I’ve done things right. All the same, I feel like it still might not be enough protection. And I know I should have done more last night before I went to bed.

      If I’d done the rituals better then maybe this earthquake wouldn’t have come.

      If Willard Fox was here right now, he’d tell me that my rituals are not going to change the world … that they wouldn’t stop an earthquake. I am not responsible for saving the fate of others or even myself. “Evie,” he’d say, “do you really think a twelve-year-old girl can unleash catastrophe? That you are capable of killing everyone you love and care about, including Jock and Moxy and Gus? Because if you can do this, Evie, then I’m pretty sure that one of those super-secret spy agencies like the CIA would have got in touch with you by now. They could use someone like you. Powers of mass destruction. They’d want to harness that, right?”

      The way he says it, it isn’t cruel or sarcastic. He’s not mocking my abilities. Willard is truly asking me the question. Do I really in my heart believe it’s because of me? Am I the one responsible for all of this?

      Sometimes I believe him and I know it’s not real. Other times, like right now, I lose faith, I fall back on the rituals.

      I know I could have done them better. But it’s been hard because I’m not at home any more. I’m in a tent, camping out, with no one around to help me and everything keeps changing. I am trying to do it right but I know I’ve been failing.

      The gods of Parnassus up high on those fluffy clouds are watching me and they see it. They know it’s all my fault. That is the burden of my powers, and if Willard was to ask me right now at this very moment if I caused all of this I would tell him the truth and say, Yes, yes of course it’s me. It’s always been me.

      My name is Evie Violet Van Zwanenberg and I am the harbinger of a power so dark that, if I cannot control it, I will destroy the world. I am no ordinary twelve-year-old girl. I have thunderbolts in my fingertips and lightning in my veins. I am the end of days. I am the bringer of earthquakes.

       CHAPTER 2

       One Year Ago – How I First Became a Thunder God

      I walk the blue line with Mum beside me in the hospital. It traces our path on the linoleum floor past A&E where feverish, pale children sit quietly beside their anxious mothers. Past the x-ray rooms where they plaster the bones broken in trampoline accidents. Then through the double doors and we are on the main ward, and as I walk I cast my gaze through an open curtain and I see a girl about my age lying asleep in her bed with tubes in her arm and in her nose, and I think, “Poor kid, she looks sick.”

      That’s the thing. I don’t think of myself as being like her. But I’m in hospital, aren’t I? There is something wrong with me. You just can’t see it.

      We keep walking through another set of double doors, still following that blue line, and now we are in a reception area and the sign on the wall by the desk is printed in clear black type on white: Adolescent Mental Health.

      Mum approaches the nurse. “I have Evie Van Zwanenberg here for her ten am appointment with Willard Fox.”

      I don’t like it here. “Hospital” is supposed to be where you go to get made better, but to me it’s a place where people go to die.

      I’m in the same building now where my dad used to be. Only to get to his ward we used to follow a different line, a red one. It would take us through from the car park and the heavy double doors along the lower corridors to the lifts.

      I remember the first time I came with Mum to see him after they’d moved him on to the ward. Mum led me through the corridors along that red line until we reached the lifts and we stepped inside this massive metal chamber and she pressed the button for Level 8, and I looked at the word on the sign on the wall and sounded it out in my head and I asked her, “What’s oncology?”

      I know what it means now. Oncology is another word for cancer. That’s what they found in my dad’s spine when he went to see the doctor about the back pain he kept getting when he was milking the cows.

      Even when I knew the word, I didn’t really know what it meant. Looking back now, I feel unbelievably stupid because I had actually found it fun making those family trips from Parnassus to Christchurch each week. Mum and I would drop Dad at the hospital and then we’d go for lunch in Container City – which is the part of town where they have made all the shops out of these big shipping containers. They did it as a temporary thing because all the buildings were destroyed in the earthquake seven years ago, but then it remained and I kind of like it the way it is now. There’s a really good noodle bar in Container City so usually we’d have noodles and mostly we’d get takeaway noodles for Dad too for later.

      Things changed once he was on the ward and he didn’t get to go home. We’d still get him noodles but he never, ever wanted to eat them. He wasn’t hungry because of the medication he was on. Mum kept buying them anyway, even though he’d just leave them sitting there going cold beside his bed. By then the cancer had metastasised. That was another word I didn’t know. It meant it had spread, travelling from his spine to his liver and his brain. Me-tas-ta-sised – that word sucked all the air out of the room when they told Mum. She couldn’t look at me as we walked back to the car without Dad that day.

      I remember how, when she unlocked the car, she kind of crumpled over for a minute and didn’t get in. I had this lump in my throat that wouldn’t go away, and when I opened my door and sat down in my seat for some reason it seemed like the right thing to do to shut my door not once but twice. Then I did the same to my seat belt, buckling and unbuckling, doing it up twice too – click-undo-click.

      Looking back, I can’t tell you why, but from that moment on the way home from the hospital when I double-shut that car door, that was when it began. I did the same thing when I got out of the car at home. I shut the door and then opened it and shut it again. I thought Mum would ask me what I was doing, but she didn’t even notice. I guess she had other things on her mind. Anyway, from then on it wasn’t that I wanted to do it. I had to do it.

      Mum didn’t notice at home either when I shut my bedroom door twice. In the morning she told me off because I’d left my bedroom light on all night and I said I’d fallen asleep but really it was because when I went to switch off the light, I had this urge for making things even, just like the car door, and I found it impossible to only press the switch once so I had to switch the lights back on again, and off and on again to make it even, and then the lights were still on and so I slept with the lights glowing and my head buried in Moxy’s fur.

      Every time from then on, when I got in the car or entered my bedroom, I completed that double door slam and on the second swing as the lock clicked shut I felt this incredible release. It was like a rush to my brain, this surge of energy that felt solid and real, and in that perfect moment I knew that somehow my actions were making everyone that I loved – Dad and Mum and Gus and Jock and Moxy – safe.

      Double-slam, double-slam. I didn’t realise that pretty soon the urge for release would become my prison. That when I tried to stop doing things twice it would throw me into an anxiety attack that made me feel like a swarm of bees was invading my brain, the buzzing inside my head making me want to scream and curl up in a ball and disappear forever.

      As the rituals took hold of me over the coming months, I desperately wanted to tell Mum what was happening to me. I mean, I was so scared of my own mind, I really thought I was going crazy. But what if I was crazy? And what if Mum found out I was having all these weird thoughts and she stopped loving me? You know, they have mental hospitals where they lock up kids like me – I’ve seen it in movies.

      The more I thought about telling